Development Update 06.09.2024

Hey all, welcome to this week's progress report.

Level: 

We have been working together with some very talented freelance conceptors to give the Sky Village an improved look.

Our work on the Alpha Camp blockout A is progressing very well. The main buildings have been implemented with most of their rough content and now we are concentrating on optimizing the collisions for all models being used and further modeling work for assets for the Alpha Camp.

Work on the flora-blockouts has mostly been completed, the only ones that are missing are the collectable plant items relevant for gameplay.

Code:

The new animation blueprint is now ostensibly finished on the technical side of things. The last missing features that were implemented this week were weapon draw/sheath, turn in place when character is rotating, torch holding, item pickup and item use animations.

We are currently writing up documentation for the animators, so they can set up the animations for it for each character.

On the sandbox side we continued work on the tutorial system and completed the first version for 5 tutorials:

Interface (Explaining the edit mode UI)

Viewport (Explaining editor camera control)

Object handling (Explaining how to place, edit, move, delete props)

Sex scenes (Explaining creation and what the various options do)

Props (Explaining creation and what the various options do)

Character: 

We spent the majority of the week implementing outfit transfers for the remaining NPCs. We are now about 80% complete and are only waiting for a few models that are currently being worked on.

Our freelance character artist is currently working on an improved model for the Feral Lion. Our goal is to make him more monstrous and threatening, an enemy to be feared.

Animations: 

On the animation side, we finished transferring the emotion layers to all character skeletons. Which means, every character in the game, including the Kerpali, can now talk to you with an appropriately happy, angry, sad or scared expression.

We also finished polishing up all the animations for the Arac enemy, they are now ready to be handed over to Game Design for combat implementation. Next up is the Gobbler - a chonky toad you can encounter in Kerpal's swampy areas! 

Design:

We continued setting up item data, but have primarily been  working on the distribution of items. This includes determining the desired amount of quantitatively limited items (e.g. upgrade materials, alchemist ingredients, weapons) and properly distributing them to enemy encounters, hidden treasure, chests, merchants, etc. on the whole world map.

Our work on character stats continues, as well. This week we reviewed the character development attributes and evaluated some designs for progression.

Thank you for all your continued support,

-Wild Life Team